William Fash, director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, wants to return some 50 pieces of carved Maya jade collected in the early twentieth century by American consul Edward Herbert Thompson. Mexico accused Thompson at the time of taking the artifacts illegally, and filed an unsuccessful lawsuit. French mineralogist Francois Farges is […]

Researchers from the University of Chicago discovered an Iron Age funerary stele at the ancient city of Sam’al, in southeastern Turkey. The stele is carved with an image of the deceased, who is thought to have been cremated, and an inscription proclaiming that his soul inhabited the stone.   The New York Times also has an […]